Monday, 14 January 2013

Tory MP backs miners' police inquiry

From Big Issue in the North magazine A solitary Conservative MP is backing
calls for an inquiry into the policing of the 1984-85 miners’ strike.

In a battle over pit closures over
11,000 miners and their supporters were arrested. Nearly three decades
later many remain angry at the treatment they received from the police.

Following a recent BBC documentary on
events at the Orgreave coking works near Rotherham on June 18 1984, South
Yorkshire Police (SYP) has referred itself to the Independent Police Complaints
Commission.

To prevent around 6,000 pickets from the National Union of Mineworkers blockading the works approximately 5,000 police officers, some on horseback,
were deployed. In the battle that followed 95 pickets were arrested and charged
with riot and unlawful assembly. All were later acquitted.

Colluded

MPs are concerned that officers involved
in the prosecutions had colluded when they wrote their statements. Now 39
of them have signed a parliamentary early day motion (EDM) calling for the
Director of Public Prosecutions to participate in the investigation of South
Yorkshire Police and ‘also deliver a full comprehensive inquiry’ into policing
throughout the UK during the one-year strike.

Sir Peter Bottomley, the long-serving
Conservative MP for Worthing West in Sussex. Bottomley was under-secretary of
state at the Department of Employment in the Margaret Thatcher government at
the time of the miners’ strike.

He has signed the edm: “Because if there
has been apparent or possible manipulation of police evidence then an inquiry
would be appropriate. I would hope the police would be prepared to join with us
by following the evidence.”

Bottomley won’t be persuading
Conservative MPs to sign the edm as “people can make up their own minds.”

One of the four Liberal Democrat MPs to
sign is trying to get others in his party to join him. South Manchester MP John
Leech originates from a mining family and said: “I think SYP tried to stitch up
the miners, just as they did later to the Hillsborough 96. I urge my fellow Lib
Dem MP’s to support EDM 775.”

Members of the public have also been
urged to support an inquiry. The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign (OTJC) has
been established.

As an admin worker at the National Coal
Board offices in Sheffield, Barbara Jackson, the OTJC spokeswoman was on strike
in 1984-85. She had no bad experiences with the police, but argues that was:
“because we were ineffective as only nine out of 900 in my workplace were on
strike. The police were nationally organised by the Association of Chief Police
Officers at New Scotland Yard, London to prevent strikers from persuading
working miners to join them. The police were often brutal and we believe around
60% of those convicted nationally over picket line charges were bogus. The
inquiry should also seek to discover whether the police were politically
manipulated by the government.”

Easington Colliery, August 24 1984 and I am faced with one of my
relatives on the other side!